User:Rae816/sandbox

Existing:
"In the spring of 1941, Arondeus started an underground periodical in which he tried to incite his fellow artists to resist the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Earlier than others, Arondeus realized that the demand by the Nazi occupiers that all Jews register with the local authorities was not, as the Nazis claimed, for their own safety, but rather so they could be deported to the Westerbork concentration camp and from there to the death camps in occupied Poland. In the spring of 1942, Arondeus founded Brandarisbrief, an illegal periodical in which he expressed the artist’s opposition to the edicts imposed by the Reichskulturkammer (Reich Chamber of Culture); the Nazis' cultural committee.""Seems like there was only one periodical, third sentence is a copy of the source listed."

Edited version:
In 1942, Arondeus started an underground periodical called the Brandarisbrief. In 1943, the Brandarisbrief merged with another publication called De Vrije Kunstenaar Through the merger, Arondeus met Gerrit van der Veen, the editor of De Vrije Kunstenaar. In the resistance, Gerrit van der Veen specialized in forging identity cards. As a result, Arondeus also became in involved in creating forged documents. A major detriment to the success of these forgeries was the Municipal Office for Population Registration as it's existence made the forgeries less useful, since their legitimacy could be checked against the registration lists and determined to be fakes. Arondeus developed a plan to destroy the registration office along with 13 associates:


 * Albert Schlosser
 * Sjoerd Bakker
 * Johannes Brouwer
 * Samuel van Musschenbroek
 * Karl Groeger
 * Geertruida van Essen
 * Coos Hartogh
 * Rudolph Bloemgarten
 * Beck
 * Honig
 * Halberstadt
 * Reitsma
 * Roos
 * Limperg

Their attack, which took place on March 27, 1943, was successful, and they managed to destroy 800,000 identity cards, and retrieve 600 blank cards and 50,000 guilders. The building was blown up and no one was caught on the night the attack. However, due to an unknown betrayer, Arondeus was arrested on April 1st, 1943. Arondeus refused to give up the rest of his team but his notebook was found, and as a result, the other 14 members of the group where arrested as well.

On June 18, 1943, Arondeus was tried and sentenced to death, along with the 13 other men who participated. They were all were executed on July 1st, 1943. Arondeus made a point of telling his lawyer to make the information that he and two other men in the group, Bakker and Brouwer, were gay, asking his lawyer to, "Tell the people that gays are no cowards!".



In 1943, Brandarisbrief merged with De Vrije Kunstenaar ("The Free Artist"), where sculptor Gerrit van der Veen was one of the editors. Together with composer Jan van Gilse; openly lesbian publisher and writer Tine van Klooster and her partner, publisher Koos Schregardus; sculptor Frits van Hall and his sister, dancer Suzy van Hall; and a number of other artists and intellectuals, the group called for mass resistance against the German occupation.[2][3]

Memorial stone in Amsterdam A concerted operation was underway to hide Jews among the local population, with various underground organizations preparing forged documents for Jews. Arondeus was a member of one such group, Raad van Verzet (Resistance Council), which also included openly lesbian cellist and conductor Frieda Belinfante and typographer Willem Sandberg, who was then curator at Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum.[4] Within a short while, the Nazis began to expose the false documents by comparing the names with those in the local population registry. To hinder the Nazis, on 27 March 1943, Arondeus led a group in bombing the Amsterdam Public Records Office. Thousands of files were destroyed, and the attempt to compare forged documents with the registry was hindered. Within a week, Arondeus and the other members of the group were arrested. Twelve, including Arondeus, were executed that July by firing squad.[2] In his last message before his execution, Arondeus, who had lived openly as a gay man before the war, told his lawyer: "Let it be known that homosexuals are not cowards!"[1]